Leading Lady
by Jane the Frog on the Wall
Summary: Set directly after "Dead Eyes," Syl reminisces and reflects on what she and Krit mean to each other. Not as sappy and angsty as it sounds, Krit/Syl goo.


title: leading lady  
series: sibling rivalry (06)  
by: jane, the frog on the wall  
rating: PG-13, nothing you wouldn't see on the show, methinks.   
spoilers: "and jesus brought a casserole"  
disclaimer: Once upon a time, there was a little girl. And she was verry little, and didn't know much about copyrights or complicated things with big words. And one day this little girl wrote a fic, using somebody else's characters, which was very illegal. But then she told people they weren't hers, in a disclaimer, and it was a little less illegal.   
notes: A tiny Krit-Syl ficlet, a product of trying to kill my writer's block. Just after the end of "Dead Eyes," Syl thinks about the past, and what Krit means to her. I think it's cute, anyway.   
feedback: send all questions, comments, death threats and everything else concerning the fic should be sent to Happygirl_com@yahoo.com  
  
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Lying there with him, on the couch as she listens to the deep steady rhythms of his breath. She feels her head rise and fall as it sits on top of his chest, realises how much she's missed it, being with him. She hasn't been able to see him much since Logan set him up with a job on the other side of Seattle, and taking care of Max hasn't given her much time to see him anywhere. She doesn't understand how Max can still see them as siblings, because as much as he's been her brother, he's always been her best friend first, and Krit before that.   
  
She can still remember the day they gave each other names. That he pointed to her and named her Syl, and that he still won't tell her why. Remembers placing her young hand on his chest, calling him Krit after the lab tech that sometimes made funny faces and told you jokes when you were in the infirmary. Krit was always like that, always made her laugh after she was held back for disobeying orders, after a drill, after Jack went to see Lydecker and never came back.   
  
She remembers being there after the escape, collapsing in a snowdrift from sheer exhaustion after running forever. She lay in the ditch, panting and steaming, waited for him to come find her like he would in the drills. He'd find her and they'd talk about nothing and everything while all the other kids were thinking about tactics and marksmanship and whether or not their bullets were rubber. She remembers the acute pain of realizing that he wasn't going to come find her, lying in a ditch with the snow melted around her, crying for the first time in her short life.  
  
She remembers being a seven-year-old pickpocket, running through the food riots, stealing her way to celebrating her eighth birthday in a sticky, reeking alley somewhere in the depths of San Antonio. She remembers how Zack found her shaking in the middle of Boston when she was ten, how he told her to head to New York, how she could have hugged him when she found Krit there.   
  
He was being unobtrusive in a market downtown, edging closer and closer to the stall with the red-faced lady who sold sandwiches. The one clear memory she has of that day involves thinking about how different he looked without his crew-cut, and how she was suddenly conscious of the fact that she was dirty and hadn't been able to bathe since the last time it rained. The first time she talked to him since before the escape was sharing smoked ham on white in an alley, laughing as he made faces at her, just like he used to.   
  
They stayed together in New York for three years, until a week after she turned thirteen. He was fourteen, old enough to get a proper job working for a construction company on the south side of the city. She can still feel the pain and nausea she felt when she found the note he left her, all of his things gone from the room they shared. All because he felt like following some girl down to Florida without her, because somebody new and different was better than she was. She remembers packing her things in a hot haze of almost-tears, running across the country to Portland, Zack kicking her out for "jeopardizing" Tinga's position, jumping from city to city like a good soldier until she was eighteen.  
  
He showed up in her apartment - the one in Vancouver, where she finally ended up - in the middle of the night on a Tuesday, something she remembers because she used to get Wednesdays off from work. He crawled in through the window, tried to be quiet as he headed to the couch, broke her lava lamp - the green one - instead. She remembers how she almost shot him, came out of her bedroom silently with the pistol she still has in her coat pocket, didn't recognize the back of his head in the dark. She told him to turn around, to feel lucky that she hadn't been trained to shoot first. Remembers how he smiled, countered with some crack about how she had, how he should know, remembers how she laughed.   
  
She also remembers realizing, at that point, how much she missed living with him, hearing his dumb jokes, yelling at him when he got too protective of her in the clubs. That was the night when she kissed him for the first time, when he kissed her back, when she first saw him cry, when he started calling her "Kitten."  
  
Thinking of that night, a year and a half later, she also realizes that he stopped being her big brother that night, too. He was her best friend, her leading man, her Krit. And he still is, she knows that. But now, she's his leading lady, his Syl. And she kind of likes that.   
  
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[[[End]]] 


End file.
